Ever His Bride

by Linda Needham

  “And could we stop there?”

  “I doubt I’d have the strength.” He held back another groan as she slid her tongue along his upper lip and then followed the line of his jaw to his ear and to his neck; her fingers played at his collar band. He held fast to her hips, stilling his own fingers from a quest that he dare not accept.

  He slid his hands upward across her silky flesh—the distance from her ever-wriggling hips to the lush curve of her waist was nothing, and everything.

  And her breath came against his ear in a long, hissing draft. “Your hands are very warm, Hunter.” She stretched out against his chest. Her eyes were half-closed and her mouth was turned up in a contented smile. “And big.”

  “They shouldn’t even be there.” Yet he couldn’t remove them any more than he could evict her from his lap, though his knees were beginning to ache.

  Her brow flickered and she opened her sea-green eyes. “But we’re married, Hunter. The courts recognize it. We kissed on it. I have a ring… .”

  “Felicity.” He wondered how she could remain so unruffled; most women would have swooned to find him so inflamed, would not have pressed against him for more. But she wasn’t just any woman: she was unbridled passion, and magnificent curiosity, and would soon have him howling at the moon if he didn’t stop this. And yet he wanted to stay here, and stray, and he imagined her writhing beneath his hands.

  “Oh, Hunter! Yes, that’s lovely.”

  Dear God, he’d been sliding his hands ever upward, skimming over her silken ribs, and he’d caught his thumbs beneath the gentle rise of her breasts. Sweet, soft mounds that begged his touch, his lips.

  “Please, Hunter.” Then she settled a kiss on his mouth.

  Please? Hell, he was already drowning in her clean, cool breezes, his resistance having flown away long ago. And she was holding his face between her honeysuckle scented hands, feathering her mouth across his brow and over his cheeks.

  “Felicity, you’re making it very difficult for me to resist you.”

  “Why would you?” She was making contented little noises that hummed inside his chest and caused her to sway like milkweed in the wind.

  “Ten minutes ago you were screaming for me to unhand you, and worried that I might see a bit of skin.”

  She giggled against his ear. “Ten minutes ago, I didn’t know what I was missing.”

  “Oh, God.” Keep a cool head, man. His wife had become a lunatic—a captivating one, but a lunatic all the same.

  “You’ll have to show me.” She slipped her hands over his and dragged them upward to cup her breasts. “Ah, yes! You see, I’m a woman, Hunter.”

  Her nipples pressed like compact miracles into his palms. “Yes, I know you’re a woman, Felicity.”

  “And as a woman, I’m allowed to change my mind.” Her eyes were closed again, and she had the look of the angels on her face as she swayed. “And your hands feel very good there, Hunter, as if I were standing on a cliff without a stitch to hide me from the eyes of the world; and you are the rising summer breeze that wraps me in splendor.”

  “Madam, you are fully clothed.”

  She opened her eyes. “Yes, but I think I’d rather not be.”

  His head was light from lack of air. His jaw ached; he commanded his thumbs to be still when they would ride the honeyed peaks. He was a single breath from taking her there on the carpet.

  “Hunter? Are you interested in making love with me? We’re way overdue.” She stood suddenly and began to unbutton the neck of her gown.

  “Overdue?” Entranced and speechless, he staggered to his feet and watched button after button fall to her fingers until nothing held her gown together across her shoulders but the weight of the linen.

  “Are you, Hunter?”

  “Interested?” he hissed, his brain boiled by a conversation that no man could ever survive. “With all your squirming and your drunk-making kisses? Madam, I want nothing more!”

  “But are you willing?”

  “Am I willing?” He’d tried patience. Had hoped anger would serve, because that was all he could muster. “You incite me to the brink of ravishing you, and you have to ask such a question?”

  “Well, I do, because I don’t know—”

  “Of course I’m willing!” he bellowed.

  “But will you?”

  He opened his mouth to answer and couldn’t. He was damned to hell either way. Serve his passion and he would probably lose her goodwill; serve hers, and his fate would be same. He hadn’t bedded or even kissed a woman in years. He’d kept himself aloof from the daughters of society and their trap-setting mothers. And he would have nothing to do with prostitutes or other women whose moral code might put the Claybourne name at risk for a scandal. He had lived without intimacy of any kind for so long, he had thought himself immune to the need.

  Oh, but God, he had the need right now … and it was for her, for his vagabond wife. He couldn’t risk a real marriage. His heart would betray him, and she would come to hate him, then she would turn on him in anger and disgust.

  But at the moment, he was standing in his own chamber, wrapped in a heady cloud of her scent, quaking like a tempted vicar, his extraordinary wife begging his hand to her breast.

  His wife.

  She had waited up for him, turned down his bed, put away his clothes, uncrated his life, greeted him with honeysuckle … and had forgiven him.

  Why did he want to weep?

  “Hunter?” Now she was looking up into his eyes with that sympathetic inquisition of hers. “Are you all right?”

  His throat worked and his mouth grew dry. Sweat wicked through his shirtsleeves. “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?” She frowned and felt his forehead. “You’re sweating like a racehorse, but you have no fever.”

  “Like hell, I don’t,” he murmured.

  She reached up a hand to his chest but he stepped away, a coward, and turned his back on her.

  “Hunter?”

  He fought the urge to turn back, to gather her into his arms and do just as she had asked. But he knew the risk, and he dare not take it. They had made a bargain; signed a contract. He was the right-thinking one.

  “This won’t do, Felicity.” He wiped at his brow with an unsteady hand and stared down into the flames in the grate.

  “Won’t do?”

  He could see her in his mind: her hair tousled from his over-eager fingers, her mouth still pouting from her unspent kisses. “I’m sorry, Felicity, I’ve let things develop between us that shouldn’t have.”

  “Why shouldn’t things have developed between us, Hunter? It’s only natural.”

  “You know as well as I—”

  “That we are temporary; yes, I know. But not so temporary that we haven’t already become … well, friends, at the least.”

  He turned then, too astounded not to. She was stunningly puritanical and practical again in her plain nightgown, now buttoned up tightly. “Friends?”

  “When this is over, Hunter—our marriage, that is— I’m quite sure I shall still consider you a friend.”

  “A friend?” he said, not believing his ears.

  “At least a friend. A very good friend. That’s been an unexpected development between us. And I’m glad of it.”

  He willed his heart to keep a steady pace, but it bounced around inside his chest. Yes, she had become a companion, a friend, a quickening. Someone to come home to—and he suddenly couldn’t imagine the day she would walk out of his life and not return. “Yes, things have developed unexpectedly.”

  And he wasn’t yet sure what to do about it, the risks. The idea needed cold analysis, not her heated kisses.

  “We were married quite inconveniently, Hunter, but I think we’ve made a success of it so far. Gotten over the bumps better than most. And I thought that we were developing an unexpected … intimacy—”

  “Damn it, Felicity! Intimate or not, friend or not, I won’t leave you unchaste for your ‘real’ husband. The one you
will marry next.” He looked back at the hearth and his steaming bath kettle, convincing himself that the heat that braced his neck was from the fire and not from a sudden fit of jealousy.

  “I see.” There was a tremble that rattled around in her sigh and made him feel guilty. “Not that it matters to you, Hunter, but I doubt that there will ever be such a man.”

  He turned abruptly. She had retied her robe, and, except for the flush on her cheeks, she looked as virginal as ever. And he ached all the more.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, shamed to admit that he had selfishly hoped that when their marriage ended she would live a single life, instead of falling in love and giving children to another man. He felt a bastard for allowing the thought to remain a hope. But with every passing hour, the idea of Felicity taking up residence in another man’s life seemed utterly unthinkable.

  “I doubt I’ll ever have the opportunity, Mr. Claybourne.” She picked up one of the pillows that she had hurled at him and clutched it to her chest.

  “Why not? Any man in the world would want you, Felicity.”

  “Oh, would they?” she said as she efficiently plumped the pillow and set it against the headboard. “Can you see yourself wedding a virginal bride who had been married once before? What kind of a recommendation would that be for a husband?”

  “The explanation of the circumstances of our marriage should be sufficient to any man worthy to claim you as wife. If not, I could certify the situation myself.” The words stuck on his tongue, and sounded patently false as they stumbled out. He could hardly see himself describing the intimate details of their marriage, least of all Felicity’s virtue, to some disapproving, disbelieving husband-to-be.

  “Thank you for the offer, Hunter, but no.” She stalked past him, leaving her scent on the air and his hands aching to reach out to her. “What kind of woman is so repugnant to a man that she is incapable of tempting a passionate man like you to her bed? I’d rather not face the shame of trying. Good night, Hunter.”

  “Felicity—”

  She had opened the door and was halfway down the hall before Hunter had realized she was leaving.

  “Damnation! Come back here!”

  When she didn’t, this time he followed.

  Chapter 17

  He crossed the hall in a dead run, and slipped on the new carpet runner. He barely caught himself, only to slam into a spindle-legged table that now waited outside her chamber door. Bric-a-brac clattered, but he remained upright and launched himself into her room.

  She was turning down the lamp at her desk.

  “Madam, were you truly hoping to tempt me to your bed tonight.”

  “Frankly, Hunter, I don’t know what I’m hoping for. I’m very confused. I’m your wife, and yet I’m not.”

  “You are my wife.” But she never even spared him a glance as she whisked past him on her way to her bed. He felt like a schoolboy suffering a drubbing by his lady love.

  “Hunter, I know that I said that I ought to save my chastity for a real husband, but you seem quite real to me at the moment.”

  “Do I?” His palms still burned with the shape of her breasts, still sweated with the memory.

  “As I figure it, if I’m to be damned for the perception, I might as well be damned for the deed.”

  Her eyes were clear and honest, and brutally trusting.

  “So, I’ve ruined you already?” he asked.

  “No, Hunter, I’m the only one who can ruin me.” She lowered the wick on the bedside lamp to a gentle glow and turned back to him. “I just think it would take an unusually open-minded man to want me after … you know.”

  He wanted her all right—wanted to touch her hair, and wrap his arms around her, but he had become more and more certain that it couldn’t possibly stop there.

  “I may never have another chance to have a man make love to me, Hunter. So I thought perhaps you could show me what becomes of all this wanting stuff—sometime, when you have a minute—”

  “A minute!”

  “Well, however long it takes.” She dropped her robe off her shoulders and draped it across the end of the bed.

  “Done right, wife, it takes hours.”

  She straightened the counterpane with her precise efficiency. “Hours?”

  “The longer the better.”

  “Really?” She turned from her fussing and raked her gaze, as hot as a furnace, down the length of him, lingered recklessly below his waist, and then lighted brightly on his face. “Can a body endure hours of that sort of thing?”

  “It can,” Hunter said, between clenched teeth. “With a great deal of concentration.”

  “There, you see, Hunter?” She climbed into her bed and pulled the counterpane up to her waist. “What a dolt I would seem to my next husband! ‘Aren’t you finished, Robert? Aunt Agatha is waiting downstairs for her tea.’”

  “Robert? You have this man picked out already?” He would kill him.

  She flung her limp arms across the pillows and sighed. “‘What’s taking you so long, Hugh?’”

  He swabbed the damp from his brow and growled. “Who is Hugh?”

  “‘Horrr-aace, I thought we’d be finished by now—’”

  “Enough, woman!” He stood over her, filled with a volcanic hatred for each of these imaginary husbands of hers. God knew what he’d feel about a husband of flesh and bone.

  “You see how very stupid I would seem.”

  He turned away in his helpless fury. “What would you have from me, Felicity?”

  “Well … instruction, I suppose.”

  “Instruction!”

  “Friend to friend, if it can’t be husband to wife.”

  “Good God.” He raked his fingers through his hair and dropped down to sit on the edge of the bed. He couldn’t look at her for fear of giving in to her ridiculous notion.

  She sat up and leaned toward him. “I think Article Four in our marriage contract covers this sort of thing, Hunter.”

  He snorted. “A miscalculation, you called it.”

  “It wouldn’t be a miscalculation if we both agreed to the risk.” She touched his elbow with the sparest of pressure, an indelible entreaty.

  It would be the biggest of all miscalculations. He was insane to even consider it. A child might come of it, and what then? Children with her would complicate matters.

  “Well, Hunter? Are you willing?”

  He finally dared a glance at her—the wood nymph caught inside the unsuspecting master’s house, sweet of face but determined to do her inexplicable magic where it wasn’t wanted.

  Oh, but he did want her. His flesh had wanted her from the start, yet his heart had been the first to betray him. He needed time and distance.

  “First answer me this, Felicity.” He tilted his chin upward and submitted to her nibbling kiss at the base of his throat.

  “Yes?”

  “When did you last bleed?”

  She sat upright, frowning. “That’s personal and private, and no kind of a question for a man to be asking, Mr. Claybourne.”

  “Maybe not, Mrs. Claybourne, but I’m asking.” He wasn’t going to risk a pregnancy. He’d read of cycles and fertility, had a book somewhere in his library, and knew there was a right time and a wrong. “When was it, Felicity?”

  “I’m not going to tell you.”

  “Very well.” He stood. His presumptuous question served as he’d hoped it would, to dampen her interest and postpone the matter for another day. He could better fight the battle and determine the risks when his nerves were cooler. “Good night, my dear. Sleep well.”

  Felicity burned with indignation as she watched her husband leave. She couldn’t imagine why he’d wanted to know when she had last had her monthly visit. He was a man … and a very nosy one.

  Yet that very realization made her feel giddy and warm inside. So did the memory of his rough-palmed hands on her breasts, and his mouth playing havoc with her senses.

  With any luck his urges would remain as s
trong as hers, and someday he would take her to his bed and make her his wife in truth.

  She relit the lamp at her desk. Work was the only way to dispel her confusion. A good dose of editorializing about the workhouse at Blenwick would do it.

  She sat down and began adding to the list of horrors she had seen, planning out her idea for a new set of articles. She would continue her travels, but she would visit workhouses and apprentice schools, instead of charming little cottages and cheese festivals. Wouldn’t rest a moment until the last child was rescued.

  Even so, half an hour’s effort to sidetrack her thoughts of Hunter had only served to make her think about him even more.

  His question hadn’t been completely indecent. Perhaps he just wanted to know that it wasn’t happening right now—perfectly understandable, considering. He hadn’t said why he needed to know such a thing, and she’d been too startled to ask.

  She hadn’t been fair to him; hadn’t been wise.

  She turned down the flame on her desk lamp and crossed the dim hallway to Hunter’s room. She knocked, but he didn’t answer; called his name softly, but still he didn’t come to the door. She had heard him leave his room soon after he’d left hers, but he had returned not five minutes later. Maybe he’d gone out again.

  Determined to settle her mind before the night got any longer, Felicity let herself into his room to wait for him.

  But as she closed the door, she heard a sound across the room and turned. Her husband stepped out of the bath closet just then, swabbing a towel across his face and his newly washed hair.

  And he wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing. Not a stitch. And he was glorious!

  “Oh, my—Hunter!”

  He stopped in his tracks—the stonecutter’s art made flesh. Every bit as magnificent as the gods and the warriors in the British Museum. Even more so!

  His midsection would no longer be blurred when she pictured him in her mind. His apparatus hung from a dark nest, suspended below an intoxicating looking appendage. The whole area had just begun to stir when he held the towel in the way of her gazing.

  “May I help you, Mrs. Claybourne?” he asked, as full of business as if she’d met him in Threadneedle Street.